[GreenKeys] Intro

[Rafal Lukawiecki]

Hello Everyone,

Just a quick intro from a newly-minted radio amateur in Ireland—I got my licence only last year. I have an interest in CW and RTTY. I made my first RTTY QSO only two weeks ago and I got hooked. :) Nearly 200 more in my log by now.

Although I am unlikely to set-up a physical teletype any time soon—never say never—I am fond of the technology. When I was a teenager I learned to program on a Polish replica of an ICL 1904 mainframe, Odra 1305. I remember interacting with it using real TTYs. I still have some of my old perforated tape, and a magnetic one at home, but I lost the punched cards. All the TTY printouts are gone, too...

I also used teletype on a CDC Cyber-74 mainframe, and an IBM 360 in those days. For a kid, it was fascinating to see how the CDC TTY would ensure some extra log-in security by blacking-out the password entry field by overprinting it with a large number of characters. :)

Thank you for sharing.

73 Rafal EI6LA